Re: Meet the new neighbors: The solar system expands.

Michael F. Stemper wrote:

On 12/09/2024 16.59, William Hyde wrote:

Cryptoengineer wrote:

 

Despite being known as the 'seven sisters', the logo has only six stars.
This matches what is actually naked eye visible now. When the cluster
acquired that name, seven were visible, but proper motion has since
moved two of them too close to resolve.

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When I first read about this cluster sixty years ago my reference said that people with "exceptionally good eyesight" could still distinguish seven stars.
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Was this true sixty years ago, or could my source possibly have uncritically quoted some older work written when this was true?
Or was it just nonsense?
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There was no point in testing it myself - I was pleased that I could see six stars.
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At the moment, I can't think of much SF that involves this cluster.

 No, but I can think of some SF that mentions a similar situation with
another cluster. In _Foundation and Earth_ our merry band of wanderers
visits a stellar system where the inhabitants refer to a cluster,
naked-eye visible from their planet, by a name implying a certain number
of stars, but having a different number.
 One of the band (Golan Trevize, maybe) works out the relative motions
and determines that the number of visible stars could not have changed
in the time the planet has been inhabited -- not by thousands of years.
 

I had totally forgotten that.
In Christopher Rowley's future the human civilization that developed in the Hyades cluster, though always offstage, is the driving force of human expansion, the peak of human culture, the place people dream of living.  It gained this status before FTL was developed, so perhaps the relatively short transit time between planets was the cause.
It's a better choice than the Pleiades, as it has many g-type stars. But the cluster is only 625 million years old so considerable terraforming would be required (not a problem in this future).
William Hyde